10

Setting an urban agenda: Human settlements and IIED-America Latina

David Satterthwaite

The last decade has brought increasing recognition by governments and international agencies of the need to develop urban policies, both to address urban poverty and in recognition of the importance of well-managed urban centres for economic growth. Many have also recognized that these require more capable, competent and accountable local (urban) governments. There is also the shift in the understanding of what constitutes urban poverty from a narrow focus where poverty is equated only with inadequate income or consumption levels to a broader recognition of the multiple forms of deprivation suffered by much of the urban population (see Box 10.1). Perhaps the most critical implication of this shift is the much increased focus on the role of local institutions in reducing urban poverty since many of the aspects of deprivation noted in the box depend on more competent, effective local institutions that are also accountable to local populations and local democratic political systems.

Three factors have helped to produce this change. The first is the recognition of the long-term trend towards increasingly urbanized populations and economic structures in almost all nations. Most of the world's urban population and most of its large cities are now in low-and middle-income nations. Asia now has close to half the world's urban population. Africa may still have more rural than urban dwellers but its urban population is now larger than that of North America, and it grows far faster than its rural population. Latin America has more than three-quarters of its population in urban centres.

The second factor is the growth in urban poverty. Many governments and some international agencies now acknowledge that they have long under-estimated the scale of urban poverty, largely because of inappropriate criteria used to define and measure it, and that action in urban areas is required if the internationally agreed poverty-reduction targets are to be achieved by 2015.

The third factor is the recognition that new urban policies and investment patterns are needed if sustainable development goals are to be met, not least because a high proportion of the world's production, consumption and waste generation (including greenhouse-gas emissions) is concentrated in urban areas. Large sections of the urban population in low- and middle-income countries are also particularly vulnerable to the likely direct and indirect effects of global warming. The changes towards more democratic governments at national and local levels, and to more decentralized political and administrative structures, over the last 10 to 20 years have also helped to highlight the key role of urban governments in achieving both environment and development goals.

But this recognition of a need for more attention to urban issues has not come easily. International concern for environmental issues has always tended to focus on natural resources rather than on the environmental-health issues that are so pressing in most urban (and rural) areas because large sections of the population lack safe and sufficient water supplies and adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, health and emergency services, and live on land sites at high risk from floods or landslides. There have been many inappropriate transfers of the urban environmental priorities of high-income nations to low-income nations so, for instance, the loss of agricultural land or wetlands to urban expansion receives more attention than the environmental-health problems that are the main cause of ill health, injury and premature death of much of the population. There have been many inaccurate assumptions about the contribution of urban poor groups in environmental degradation when it is overwhelmingly the middle- and high-income groups in urban areas that are responsible for the resource use and waste generation that underlie environmental degradation.

When the failure of development policies to bring benefits to most lower-income groups was recognized in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the world was much less urbanized. Then, as now, there has been a tendency by international ‘experts’ to see urban populations as privileged, in part because major cities usually concentrate investments in housing, water supply, sanitation, schools and health care systems. What these ‘experts’ so often fail to notice is that most poorer groups in these cities do not have access to these services and that most of the urban populations outside the major cities are as ill served as most of the rural population.

When IIED was asked by the secretariat of World Commission on Environment and Development (The Brundtland Commission) to draft a chapter on urban issues for its report Our Common Future¹ in 1985, this was strongly opposed by some members of the Commission – as if the Commission's emphasis on ‘the needs of the present’ did not include the 600 million urban dwellers who survived on very inadequate incomes and who lived in homes and neighbourhoods lacking provision for the most basic urban infrastructure and services (safe sufficient water, provision for sanitation and drainage, schools and health care). Many international agencies developed urban policies and strategies only in the last few years and none did so without opposition both from within the agency and outside. As late as 2001, the World Bank could produce a World Development Report on poverty that still refused to recognize the scale of deprivation in urban areas and the fact that urban poverty has characteristics and causes that are not the same as those of rural poverty.²

Although the World Bank has many staff with long experience in urban projects, it could still produce estimates for the scale of poverty worldwide based on a single income-based poverty line (US$1 per day), as if the income that a household needs to avoid deprivation is the same in rural areas as in the major cities. There are still some academics and many politicians and bureaucrats who insist that the priority is rural development and that any support for urban development will simply exacerbate urban problems – as it encourages more migrants to move into cities. There are those who still cling to notions about urban migrants moving to cities being attracted by ‘the bright lights’, despite 30 years of evidence, showing rural-to-urban migration flows to be logical and usually carefully planned responses to changing economic circumstances.

This chapter charts the development of IIED's work in urban areas from its origins in 1974, through the formation of its Human Settlements Programme in 1976 to the setting up of a Latin American office in 1979 and its development into an independent Argentine non-profit organization in 1988. It also describes how it sought to change the way that policy-makers view urban centres and their inhabitants. The Human Settlements Programme not only formed an important strand of IIED's work but also helped to develop new forms of collaboration with partner institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The story of IIED's work in urban areas is also, in large part, the story of the work of Jorge E Hardoy, the Argentine urban specialist who founded and developed IIED's Human Settlements Programme and who subsequently founded IIED-América Latina. Although he died in 1993, the work on human settlements issues both in London and within IIED-América Latina in Buenos Aires still follows the lines and structures he helped to establish.

IIED's HUMAN SETTLEMENTS PROGRAMME

The need to address both urban and rural problems in Africa, Asia and Latin America was recognized from the Institute's earliest years, as can be seen in the book Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, written by IIED's President, Barbara Ward and the Nobel laureate, René Dubos in 1971-72³. This book was prepared for the first of the large UN conferences held to draw attention to key global problems – the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm – at the request of the Conference's Secretary-General, Maurice Strong. This proved to be one of the best selling books on the environment during the 1970s. Unlike most other books on the environment at that time, it combined environmental concerns with concerns for human development and social justice. It also contained what was later to be taken up by the Brundtland Commission as the defining goal of sustainable development, as its introduction states that the ‘charge of the U.N. to the [Stockholm] Conference was clearly to define what should be done to maintain the earth as a place suitable for human life not only now, but also for future generations’ (p25).

After the success of Only One Earth, in 1974, Barbara Ward was asked by the Canadian government to write a popular book on human settlements issues, as the Canadian government was to host Habitat, the UN Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976. This book, entitled The Home of Man,⁴ covered such issues as the rapid growth of cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the growing proportion of city populations living in tenements and illegal and informal settlements and the large proportion of rural and urban populations lacking safe and sufficient supplies of water and provision for sanitation. It also demanded a greater priority from governments and international agencies to improving provision for water and sanitation and this was a point that Barbara Ward stressed in the many speeches that she made and articles that she wrote for newspapers during the preparations for the conference. This point received enthusiastic support from the Canadian government and from the UN Secretariat which organized the Conference. The need for a greater priority for water and sanitation was then formally endorsed by the 132 governments who were represented at the Habitat Conference and this subsequently led to the 1980s being declared by the UN General Assembly as the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, after a special UN Conference on water in 1977.

One of Barbara Ward's main advisers for the preparation of The Home of Man was the Argentine urban specialist Jorge E Hardoy. Writing from the Institute that he had founded in Argentina, the Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales (CEUR), from 1974, he sent material to Barbara Ward to help her prepare the book, and also comments on her drafts. Here was someone who, nearly 30 years ago, was highlighting the urban issues that were to come to the centre of international concerns during the 1990s – the importance of developing more accountable, effective, democratic urban governments and more ‘bottom-up’ urban approaches that supported the actions and priorities of the urban poor and their organizations. These issues became so central to the discussion of urban development that perhaps their importance now seems self-evident. But few people were stressing the issue of ‘good governance’ at this time. Also, very few were stressing that it was good policy and practice by local governments in low- and middle-income countries that was the priority, rather than concentrating on the role of international agencies.⁵

IIED's contact with Jorge Hardoy was much strengthened when he accepted the Institute's invitation to work with it in Vancouver, during the UN Conference on Human Settlements in 1976. He took part in The Vancouver Symposium, a small group of urban specialists invited by IIED to meet just before the UN Conference and to define the priorities that the Conference should tackle, and also to draw the attention of the world's press to the Conference. Its declaration to the Conference included a very strong statement about the need for a much greater priority to be given to water and sanitation. Barbara Ward presented these points in a memorable address to the entire Conference; it was a measure of how highly regarded she was, since very few ‘non-governmental’ people have ever been invited to give a presentation to the plenary of these large governmental conferences.

The Symposium itself received considerable press coverage and prominence at the Conference – helped by the fact that the Symposium included some of the most famous ‘global’ thinkers of that era, for instance not only Barbara Ward but also Margaret Mead, Maurice Strong and Buckminster Fuller. The Symposium also received the full support of the official conference's host government (Canada) and the UN Secretariat, and the recommendations for a higher priority to be given to water and sanitation were already in the draft recommendations prior to the Conference.

In 1976, Argentina was in the midst of one of its most tragic political episodes, as the military government detained and murdered thousands of its citizens without charges and without trial. Jorge Hardoy had already had problems with the Argentine government. In 1976, when he went to renew his passport, he was seized and detained without trial and without charges. Only after a flood of protests to the Argentine government from academics from around the world through phone-calls, telegrams and telexes was he released. When in Vancouver, Jorge Hardoy received advice through a contact from the Ford Foundation that his life would be in danger if he returned to Argentina after the Conference. He accepted an invitation from the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex to join them as a senior fellow and from IIED to develop a new programme on human settlements. His wife and children also had to leave Argentina, and joined him in England; many other members of his institute, CEUR, also had to leave Argentina.

The initial goal of IIED's new Human Settlements Programme was to evaluate the extent to which governments and international agencies changed their policies and practices in line with the relatively radical recommendations they had formally endorsed at the Habitat Conference in Vancouver. Initial funding for the Programme came from the Canadian government; Barbara Ward received an enthusiastic response from the then Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau, to her request for support. Jorge Hardoy agreed to direct the Programme, but on condition that it was formed by teams from different regions in the South. It was initially made up of teams based in the Sudan, Kenya, Argentina and India who visited countries in their region and prepared reports on conditions and trends in housing, basic services and other human settlements issues.⁶ Thirty-one national assessments were prepared.

Meanwhile, staff based in London began to monitor the (usually very low) priority given by aid agencies and development banks to water supply, sanitation, slum and squatter upgrading, primary health care, education, and other projects that sought to bring direct benefits to low-income groups in urban and rural areas. Much of this work was done in collaboration with Yves Cabannes who, at that time, was with the French NGO GRET. Yves Cabannes remained a key partner and adviser to the Programme when he moved to work with community groups in Northeast Brazil and later came to head the UN Urban Management Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean –helping to develop IIED's work on housing finance and collaborating in the organization of work and seminars on Local Agenda 21s and on poverty reduction in the region.

From 1977 to the mid-1980s, collaborative research programmes were implemented on a range of topics. This included work on the role of small and intermediate-size urban centres in rural, regional and national development. The need for more attention to smaller urban centres is now recognized as an important issue, since most of the urban population in Africa, Asia and Latin America does not live in large cities, and the proportion of population lacking adequate housing with basic infrastructure and services is usually higher in smaller urban centres than in the large cities. But in the early 1980s, it was difficult to convince funding agencies of the relevance of this work. The work also stressed the importance of understanding rural–urban linkages, as the economy of so many smaller urban centres relies heavily on demand from rural producers and consumers and economic linkages with rural production. This too was a subject for which it was difficult to get funding as few international institutions wanted to fund urban research and institutions that funded rural work did not want to fund anything that had urban components.

IIED's work on small and intermediate urban centres was to lay the ground for its work on rural-urban interlinkages developed under the direction of Cecilia Tacoli during the 1990s. In the early 1980s, work also began on the multiple links between housing conditions and health in informal or illegal settlements and this led to a warm and fruitful working relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO) as IIED staff sat on WHO working groups and contributed to WHO technical reports. Perhaps surprisingly, this also increased IIED's knowledge of Moscow and St Petersburg. WHO received funding from the (then) Soviet Union in the form of roubles – and since these had no value outside the Soviet Union, WHO organized the meeting of various technical committees in Moscow and St Petersburg (at that time, Leningrad).⁷

During 1989, the head of the Lagos team, Tade Akin Aina, came to spend a year at IIED, developing work on housing and health and on the links between sustainable development and cities – and he also helped to develop the early issues of the Human Settlements Programme's journal Environment and Urbanization.⁸ The Programme has also long drawn on the advice of staff at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, especially Sandy Cairncross who developed the book The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities⁹ with Programme staff, became a member of the advisory board of Environment and Urbanization and later joined IIED's Board, and Carolyn Stephens who helped prepare a special issue of Environment and Urbanization on city inequality.¹⁰

IIED's Human Settlements Programme was unusual in comparison to most research programmes based in Europe and North America. First, much of the funding it raised went to the research partners in the South, with only a small staff based at IIED in London. Second, the intention from the outset was to increase the capacity and influence of the partners – the Institute for Development Studies in Mysore, CEUR (Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales) in Buenos Aires, the University of Khartoum and the University of Lagos – and each was supported in developing its own publication programme, in the languages of its region. The long-term goal was also that each of the four partner institutions develop their own collaborative research programme with other institutions in its region.

A third unusual aspect was the Programme's stress on collaborative research, not comparative research. The intention of having teams in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Arab World was not so much to compare national and regional experiences as to consider a set of common issues and concerns, recognizing that how they were addressed by governments was rooted in very different political, economic, social and ecological circumstances. IIED staff and representatives from the four teams met regularly to review progress and plan future research. Barbara Ward took a keen interest in the programme and hosted one of the meetings that brought together the directors of the collaborating teams. David Runnalls, who directed IIED from its formation in 1973 until 1983 when he moved to the US to direct its North American Office, also took part in many of the Programme's meetings and helped to nurture and support its development.

Although in the early years the Programme concentrated on research, from the early 1980s it began also to work in action-projects or in linking research with action. All four of the partner teams sought to provide technical and legal advice to those living in illegal settlements and to support initiatives to address housing and health problems, as part of the research work documenting the health problems in illegal settlements. This combination of research and action had become common practice in Latin America during the 1970s but was less common in Asia and Africa and among development researchers based in Europe and North America.

IIED-AMÉRICA LATINA

The Human Settlements Programme became even more decentralized in 1979, when Jorge Hardoy and his family returned to Argentina and founded what began as the Latin American office of IIED in Buenos Aires and was later to become IIED-América Latina. Argentina was still under the rule of the military dictatorship. The level of repression had reduced, although Jorge Hardoy was still not permitted to teach, and no official institution in Argentina would have been able to offer him work. (This was to change dramatically when Argentina returned to democratic rule in 1983 and Jorge was asked whether he would consider becoming Under-secretary for Housing – which he refused.) Later, political circumstances permitted the development of IIED's Latin American office into an independent Argentine-registered foundation, IIED-América Latina.

Jorge Hardoy's return to Latin America led to a great expansion in the research undertaken within Latin America (often with CEUR) and to a Latin-America-wide programme of seminars, workshops and publications (usually organized with the Latin American Social Science Research Council and often with the Inter-American Planning Society). This programme of seminars and workshops – often ten or more each year, organized in different places in different nations –had particular importance in promoting new ideas among hundreds of young researchers and NGO staff. There had been little possibility for such discussions within universities and government research institutes under the non-elected (often military) governments common in the region during the 1970s and early 1980s. Jorge Hardoy was one among many of Latin America's outstanding scholars in environment and development issues who had been forced out of universities and government research institutions for political reasons. Many of those who had been forced out had also set up independent research groups or NGOs in different Latin American nations. The programme of seminars and workshops was organized in partnership with a great range of such groups, many of whom remain today among the best-known centres of urban research, for example, DESCO in Peru, SUR in Chile and CIUDAD in Ecuador.

This annual seminar programme had several important characteristics. First, each seminar was jointly organized with one or more NGOs or other institutions. Second, each seminar sought to ensure that young researchers had the chance to participate and to present papers. Third, the papers presented at each seminar were published, giving many young researchers their first opportunity to publish, and providing the basis for a new literature on urban issues within the region. Fourth, certain themes were identified that were of particular importance to urban areas and these became the themes for seminar series – so each year, one or more seminars considered themes as ‘small and intermediate urban centres’, ‘rethinking the Latin American city’, ‘housing and health’ and ‘natural disasters’.

To promote new thinking and new ideas requires constant support and stimulus, although many external funders did not understand this (‘why do you want to hold another seminar on natural disasters when you had one on this topic last year?’) Jorge Hardoy's particular interest and expertise in urban history also led to a series of seminars and publications on different aspects of Latin America's urban history, often on topics that helped to shed new light on contemporary urban problems. It also led to research on how to protect the rich historical patrimony of many of the region's cities without displacing the low-income groups which were so often concentrated there in tenements and cheap boarding houses¹¹ and this work helped to generate a new interest in such themes throughout the region.

It often proved difficult to obtain funding for this annual seminar programme and the publications associated with it, since these were not regarded as ‘research’. The support of the international NGO Division of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was particularly important. Indeed, Ron Leger who directed the programme at that time always commented that he was not sure about the relevance of research but saw the great validity of the seminar and publication programme as it promoted new ideas throughout the region. This programme brought a whole new generation of Latin American researchers and activists into debates about housing and urban policies and many went on to form or staff some of the region's most influential research groups and NGOs. Many also went into national and municipal government or back to the universities, in countries which returned to democracy – including some who subsequently were elected as mayors of major cities or who became directors of planning.

In 1982, IIED's Latin American office (which was to become IIED-América Latina in 1988) founded the journal Medio Ambiente y Urbanizacion with the Latin American Social Science Research Council (CLACSO). This was originally conceived as a bulletin more than a journal, to keep the growing network of people and institutions involved in urban research, and in the seminars and workshops, in touch with each other. It was also another way of reaching a wider audience in Latin America with the findings of IIED's research and of providing a larger circulation for the papers presented in the seminar programme. This developed into one of the region's most widely read and circulated journals; over 50 issues have been published since it was founded.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the Human Settlements Programme remained jointly managed by IIED in London, IIED-America Latina in Buenos Aires and collaborating teams in Asia and Africa, with a small staff in IIED's London office (never more than two people) responsible for coordinating the work in Africa and Asia and working with IIED-América Latina on fundraising and publications. IIED-América Latina also widened its focus as a new programme was set up to provide direct support to the improvement of housing conditions and basic services in informal settlements (set up by Ana Hardoy)¹² and with the establishment of the FICONG programme, a Latin-America-wide programme of training workshops and seminars for NGOs and municipal authorities.

EXTENDING THE INFLUENCE OF RESEARCH: THE ROLE OF NETWORKING

One concern of researchers working on environment and development issues is how to ensure that their findings influence professionals and, where possible, politicians, in governments and international agencies. The research undertaken by the teams in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab nations on subjects such as the extent of the health problems associated with poor-quality housing and the role of small and intermediate urban centres needed to reach a wider audience than through conventional academic publications. Publishing research findings in even the best-known academic journals is no solution since most have very little circulation outside Europe and North America, because of their high subscription costs. Many journals cost several hundred pounds a year and have no provision for cheaper subscriptions for individuals or institutions in low- and middle-income countries.

There is also much less interchange between academics and professionals in the South through journals, seminars and conferences, and little contact between researchers and NGOs and municipal authorities. The Human Settlements Programme sought new means to reach a wider audience, following the precedent set within Latin America through the programme of seminars and workshops and through publications that had a large circulation in the South. Of particular importance in this were two book series: one in English published with Earthscan (with nine books published between 1989 and the present ¹³), the other, published by IIED-América Latina in Spanish.¹⁴

Staff from the Programme also recognized that preparing key documents for international agencies also helped to ensure a wider circulation for the Programme's research findings – as in the drafting of the urban chapter for Our Common Future (the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development/The Brundtland Commission) published in 1987, and in the preparation of other widely distributed publications for WHO, UN-Habitat and the OECD.¹⁵ The preparation of each of these documents drew on the work and advice of a large network of individuals and institutions. Programme staff also contributed to the work of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

This network also helped to develop the Programme's English-language journal, Environment and Urbanization which was founded in 1989. It drew on the precedents set by the success of IIED-América Latina's journal, Medio Ambiente y Urbanizacion, and sought to demonstrate new ways by which professional journals could operate. First, it took measures to ensure that most authors were from Africa, Asia and Latin America rather than having the list of authors dominated by academics from Europe and North America. Second, it encouraged practitioners as well as researchers to write. Third, it ensured a wide circulation in Africa, Asia and Latin America by allowing any NGO or teaching or training institution in low- and middle-income nations to obtain it free. It also became one of the most widely circulated and cited journals in Europe and North America and provided the key text in many postgraduate and professional training programmes. It could not have fulfilled its initial goals, without the help of this network of researchers and NGO staff, yet none of these individuals received funding for this help. It would also not have been possible without the support of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) which helped to fund the launch of the journal and has always helped to cover the cost of printing and distribution to institutions in low- and middle-income nations which cannot afford to subscribe.¹⁶

FUNDING RESEARCH TEAMS IN THE SOUTH

For any Northern-based research institution, collaborative research with Southern partners changes the nature of the tasks they undertake. The work within the Human Settlements Programme has been less the undertaking of primary research and more the development of new research lines with Southern partners, raising finance, coordinating research projects, spreading new ideas, methodologies and concepts from one country or region to the next, and disseminating the research findings within the North and the South.

The emphasis on supporting Southern teams stemmed from the recognition that external agencies often misunderstand local contexts and distort local priorities. The importance of human settlements projects involving local NGOs and drawing on local knowledge and expertise came to be more widely recognized from the mid-1980s. In some cases, international non-governmental funding agencies have withdrawn from implementing projects themselves and now prefer to support local projects and local implementers. But research is still viewed somewhat differently. Most funding for ‘development research’ from funding institutions in Europe and North America goes to researchers from Europe and North America. Most national funding bodies used to require that funds were spent entirely (or primarily) on researchers in their own countries, and some still do so. Among the few Northern research-funding institutions that have given a priority to funding researchers in the South, there has been a growing pressure from their funders and from researchers in their own countries to fund more researchers in their own countries.

Two advantages to decentralizing the direction and management of research to local groups need to be stressed. The first is that local research groups have an understanding of local context which is central to research in human settlements. It is rare for external researchers to develop a deep understanding of local context. Second, and perhaps of most importance, most local research groups are committed to their locality and to building up local knowledge and feeding and developing local networks. The work that they do is more accessible to other researchers and other local groups. Research outputs often have an importance greater than their direct results. They are disseminated through many informal routes and are brought together with research in other related areas. In addition, and particularly important for work on issues relating to urban poverty or to urban development within predominantly low-income areas, the research results can also be easily linked with local NGO activity in both action research and operational programmes.

IIED's work with Southern teams led to two other work areas. The first was in response to the request from international agencies for overview studies, each focusing on a different aspect of the urban environment, which draw together the work of Southern partners. These include the books published by Earthscan such as Environmental Problems in Third World Cities in 1992 (with a new edition published in 2001 under the title Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World) which was originally prepared as an overview for DFID before the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) and The Environment for Children (prepared at the request of UNICEF) in 1996. The second is to respond to requests from particular international agencies for help as they develop their urban programmes. Human Settlements Programme staff have worked with Sida, DFID, Danida and WaterAid as they developed urban policies, and with many other international agencies in seminars and workshops seeking to develop their work in urban areas.

THE SHIFT IN RESEARCH PARTNERS

The Programme had long stressed that cities are the result of an enormous range of investments of capital, expertise and time by individuals, households, communities, voluntary organizations and NGOs, as well as those investments made by governments and the private sector. Many of the most effective initiatives to improve housing conditions among low-income groups have come from local NGOs or community organizations. Yet in most cities, the individual, household and community efforts that help to build and manage cities have long been ignored by governments and international agencies, and these are often constrained by unnecessary government regulations. This had been a constant theme in the Programme's work – and in the writings of Jorge Hardoy – and it was a central theme of Squatter Citizen, the book he and I co-wrote.

During the late 1980s, two changes helped to reinforce the Programme's focus on community development. The first was the establishment of the community-development team in IIED-América Latina by Ana Hardoy. Initially, this worked in Barrio San Jorge, an informal settlement in one of the peripheral municipalities in Buenos Aires, and later in many other low-income settlements. Unlike previous work areas, this was not research but direct, hands-on support to community-based development and to working with community-based organizations to negotiate with external agencies (including municipal agencies) for support, services and land. The work of this team constantly fed ideas back to the researchers, including a better understanding of possibilities and constraints. It acted as a ‘reality check’ on the relevance of research in other areas – and helped to reveal the limitations of conventional policy research.

The second change was the shift in research partners in Latin America, Asia and Africa from academic institutions to activist NGOs who worked directly with urban poor groups and with urban governments but who also had research interests. This change was, in part, because the academic institutions with which the Programme had worked during the 1980s were less able to work directly with low-income groups. It was also, in part, due to the difficulties that IIED faced in raising funds for them; the academic institutions were far more dependent on IIED for funds for research. None of IIED's early partners managed to become centres of research for their wider region, which had been the original intention.

Working with more action-oriented NGOs and with the community-development programme in IIED-America Latina has brought many insights about how it was possible for external agencies to support participatory, community-driven development. Apart from the work of IIED-América Latina, among the key NGOs that have helped to reshape the approach of the Programme are: the Indian NGO SPARC (and its work with cooperatives of women pavement dwellers, Mahila Milan and the National Slum Dwellers Federation), the People's Dialogue on Land and Shelter in South Africa (and its partner the South African Homeless People's Federation), the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (with its secretariat in Bangkok) and Orangi Pilot Project (in Pakistan). A considerable part of the Human Settlements Programme's research over the last eight years has been with these groups or has drawn on their work. Staff from these NGOs have also been partners in the organization of seminars and workshops for staff from international agencies and also advisers for the preparation of different issues of the journal Environment and Urbanization. One other critical characteristic of these NGOs is that they have never depended on IIED for funding. This enables a much more equal relationship between partners.

Working on urban environmental problems, the partnerships with IDEA in Manizales (Colombia), Ecociudad (Peru) and the Centre for Science and Environment (India) have been particularly important. So too has the Programme's long association with the urban environmental research programme of the Stockholm Environment Institute and its partners in Indonesia, Brazil and Ghana. The director of this programme, Gordon McGranahan, came to join IIED in 2000. From this developed IIED's work documenting innovative Local Agenda 21s and other environmental action plans developed by local authorities and local NGOs. These include case studies in Manizales (Colombia), Ilo and Chimbote (Peru), Durban (South Africa), Jinja (Uganda), Penang (Malaysia), Surabaya (Indonesia), and Rufisque (Senegal), all prepared with local partners.

This collaboration with Southern NGOs helped the Programme focus on the means to support low-income groups and their community organizations. One consistent theme has been the need for international funding agencies to support grassroots initiatives directly and to consider new institutional means to do so – including setting up Funds for Community Initiatives located within cities in the South. Such funds would allow the setting of new standards in terms of speed of response to requests for funding, and in terms of accountability and transparency to urban poor groups themselves. The clearest starting point of work in this area was a paper co-authored by staff at IIED and IIED-América Latina in 1989 which considered how bilateral and multilateral donor agencies might be more effective in targeting funds to support low-income households and their community organizations. Its main proposal was that funding be allocated to foundations or non-profit institutions based in cities in the South that would then encourage and support community-based initiatives with decisions taken locally about what should receive funding.

The paper was circulated to a small number of people in some of the major agencies. Although the paper received little reaction initially, some of its ideas were subsequently incorporated into the initiatives of certain international agencies, including UNDP's LIFE Programme and DFID's C3 City Challenge Fund. The European Commission requested IIED's help in developing city-based grant and loan funds for community initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa in 1995 but despite the enthusiasm of its staff (and a lot of preparatory work over 18 months), the idea was halted. It was never made clear why, except that some European Community representatives within sub-Saharan African countries had objected to funding channels over which they had little influence. Ironically, the very strength of these local funds – that priorities are determined by local demand from urban poor groups – was the very reason why the concept proved unacceptable to senior staff within the European Commission.

The work with groups such as SPARC, the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, Orangi Pilot Project and People's Dialogue for Land and Shelter highlighted the importance of community-based savings and credit schemes that helped low-income households to organize, save and develop their own priorities in regard to housing and basic services. IIED's work in this area was developed by Diana Mitlin, an economist who had joined the Programme in 1989. She also took leave of absence from IIED during 1999-2000 to spend 18 months working with the South African Homeless People's Federation. IIED's work in this area has included a study of credit programmes for housing and infrastructure development,¹⁷ the preparation of a special issue of Environment and Urbanization on this theme, case studies by the Orangi Pilot Project (Pakistan) and the Urban Poor Associates (the Philippines), a series of seminars, and a newsletter HiFi News which circulates among a large network of NGOs and other institutions interested in community-based finance systems. IIED has also commissioned and published many studies of innovative housing and infrastructure finance schemes, both within its working papers series and in Environment and Urbanization.

OTHER PRESENT AND FUTURE AREAS OF WORK

Three other work areas have taken on increasing importance during the second half of the 1990s: children and the city; rural–urban linkages; and what the achievement of sustainable development goals implies for cities.

Work on children and the city began in the mid-1980s, driven initially by work in IIED-América Latina that sought to highlight how inadequately the needs and priorities of children and young people were being addressed in cities in the region. The work began with a series of seminars and publications. IIED and IIED-América Latina also began their association with UNICEF and its Innocenti Research Centre in Florence. IIED worked with UNICEF's urban advisers to develop its work in urban areas. Jorge Hardoy helped the Innocenti Research Centre to develop work on the urban child, and, during meetings of the advisory board there, he met Roger Hart of the Children's Environments Research Group (CERG) in New York. I had also helped UNICEF to develop its position paper for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit). When I was asked by UNICEF to prepare a report on the links between children and the environment after the Conference, I called on Roger Hart for help, along with Carolyn Stephens and David Ross from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Caren Levy from the Development Planning Unit (University College London), who had long served as a source of advice and joint work, and Jac Smit of the Urban Agriculture Network.¹⁸

Roger Hart subsequently spent some months working in IIED's London office, with one of his colleagues (also a child-development specialist) Sheridan Bartlett. During this time, the two of them worked with IIED on preparing a second book for UNICEF, also published by Earthscan, called Cities for Children. This focused on the role that city and municipal authorities could and should have in meeting the needs and priorities of children and youth. Sheridan Bartlett also came to work part-time for IIED, both in developing the work on children and, when Diana Mitlin went to work in South Africa, taking over as Managing Editor of the journal Environment and Urbanization.

The work on rural-urban linkages was a conscious attempt to link the work of IIED's Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods Programme and the Human Settlements Programme. It was based on the obvious but often forgotten point that rural-urban interactions affect both rural and urban development and are often critical influences on rural resource use and management. Yet most governments and international agencies still have institutional structures that treat ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ development separately. Cecilia Tacoli joined IIED in 1996 to develop this work which has centred on research with partner institutions in Tanzania, Mali and Nigeria. The work has helped to highlight the importance of both ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ components for the livelihoods of many poor (and non-poor) households. It has also highlighted the need for ‘rural’ components to most urban development programmes and for ‘urban’ components to most rural development programmes, based on evidence from case studies. Various international agencies including DFID, DANIDA and the World Bank have drawn on IIED's work on rural-urban linkages in their publications or training seminars.

The work on identifying what changes are needed in policy and practice for urban centres to contribute more to sustainable development goals began when Programme staff were asked to brief the Secretariat of the Brundtland Commission in 1985. The work has included:

• drafting of the urban chapter in Our Common Future (the Brundtland Commission's 1987 report);
• setting out the basis by which an urban policy can meet sustainable development goals in 1992 (within the book Environmental Problems in Third World Cities) and developing this over time (with four special issues of the journal Environment and Urbanization and an Earthscan reader devoted to the theme of sustainable cities);
• helping to organize Global Forum, the Conference in Manchester in 1994 that brought delegations from 50 cities around the world to develop how urban policy and practice could contribute more to sustainable development goals;
• developing a framework to ensure more complementarity between the ‘brown agenda’ focusing on environmental health, and the ‘green agenda’ focusing on ecological sustainability;¹⁹
• supporting the documentation of innovative Local Agenda 21s in Africa, Asia and Latin America;
• contributing to the reports of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change;
• drafting policy guidelines on the urban environment for the OECD Development Assistance Committee;
• working with the UN Institute for Advanced Studies on the spatial dimensions of different urban environmental burdens.

Before ending this chapter with some reflections on the future, here are a few comments about the people who created and sustained the Human Settlements Programme. I joined IIED in 1974 with the intention of working there for six months, before going to Canada to take a Masters course on arts and theatre management. My task was to help organize the literature that had been collected for Barbara Ward to write the book The Home of Man. When Barbara Ward's research assistant left, I was asked to stay on. It was impossible to refuse; the work was a joy, as was working with Barbara and with David Runnalls, who were building the Institute at that time. The temporary job turned into a permanent job and I have been working at IIED ever since, apart from time off to undertake postgraduate studies. Perhaps my greatest good fortune was to be asked to work with Jorge Hardoy as he began building the Human Settlements Programme in 1977 – and I worked with Jorge until his death in 1993 and was the Director of the Human Settlements Programme until Gordon McGranahan took over in 2002.

In the end, the history of IIED's Human Settlements Programme is one of the collective efforts of many people and institutions. Many individual contributions have not received sufficient acknowledgement in this chapter, and four need special mention. The first is Diana Mitlin, an economist who joined IIED from the UK government's Civil Service in 1989 who, more than anyone else, developed the Programme's links with activist NGOs in Africa and Asia. She also developed our work on housing finance systems and managed the journal Environment and Urbanization for its first decade. The second is Jane Bicknell who joined the Programme in 1983 and who subsequently came to work part-time as the co-editor of Environment and Urbanization. The quality of the journal and its regularity owes much to her work. She has copy-edited every issue from its foundation in 1989 – and has also helped to edit many other IIED publications. The third is Julio Davila who worked with the Programme from 1984 to 1990, including undertaking research on small and intermediate urban centres and managing the Institute's research on urban change in Latin America from 1850 to the present. In 1990, Julio joined the staff of the Development Planning Unit (University College London), but he has been on the editorial board of Environment and Urbanization from its foundation and continues to work with IIED in joint research initiatives. The fourth is Gordon McGranahan who may have only joined the Programme in 2000 (and who became the Programme's director in 2002) but with whom the Programme had worked for much of the 1990s, when he was at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

There are also the many former and current staff members of IIED-América Latina who have contributed much to the work of the Human Settlements Programme including Ana Hardoy (Executive Director of IIED-América Latina and also a Board member of IIED), Hilda Herzer, Silvia Blitzer, Silvina Arrossi, Alfredo Stein and Ricardo Schusterman. There are also people such as Somsook Boonyabancha (Asian Coalition for Housing Rights), Sheela Patel (SPARC, India), Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (Centre for Science and Environment, India), Arif Hasan (working with Orangi Pilot Project in Pakistan) and Jorge Anzorena (SELAVIP), on whose advice and support the Programme has long drawn.

There are also certain key individuals in funding agencies without whose support, enthusiasm and advice the Programme could not have existed, especially Ron Leger (CIDA), Goran Tannerfeldt (Sida), Joep Bijlmer (Dutch Development Cooperation), Michael Mutter (DFID) and Francoise Lieberherr (SDC). In addition, there is a network of people scattered throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America and within some research centres in Europe and North America, who have provided advice and guidance and been partners in organizing seminars and publications – most of whom have never received funding from IIED. These people have also been central to the development of the journal Environment and Urbanization as they contributed papers, provided suggestions on potential authors and themes, and reviewed papers submitted to the journal.

Perhaps the Programme's greatest challenge for the future is to help to ensure changes in institutional structures within governments and international agencies so that they become far more effective in addressing the problems that the research has highlighted, and more accountable to low-income groups. In 2002, there are many positive developments that were not there or hardly present when the Programme began. First, there are organized federations of the urban poor in increasing numbers of countries, and these are demonstrating cheaper, more effective, more participatory ways to address poverty and homelessness.²⁰ Second, far more local NGOs have learnt to work with urban poor groups and their organizations in ways that are more participatory and accountable. Many such NGOs and the community organizations they work with have also developed new models for working with (and changing the approaches of) local governments. Third, in most nations, local governments have become more democratic and many have become more effective. Fourth, more international agencies have developed urban programmes and have recognized the need to support accountable and effective local institutions (including community organizations and the federations formed by urban poor groups, as well as local NGOs and local governments). There is also the hope that the Cities Alliance formed by the World Bank and the UN Centre for Human Settlements (renamed in 2001 UN Habitat), with support from many of the OECD nations’ bilateral agencies will bring more coherence and a greater scale of impact to international assistance to urban development.

However, there are also many failings and weaknesses. Urban poverty continues to grow in most nations, and most governments and international agencies show little capacity to address it, or little interest in doing so. The promises made in the 1970s by governments and international agencies greatly to improve provision for water and sanitation to both rural and urban areas have not been met in most nations; one wonders whether the promises made during the 1990s to halve poverty by 2015 will be met. Despite the innovation shown by some NGOs and local authorities in developing Local Agenda 21s, these are the exceptions, not the norm. Meanwhile, the innovations in urban policy and practice shown by international agencies remain far short of the needed scale. In 2002, we have the precedents to show how urban poverty can be reduced (most of them developed by urban poor groups themselves) and how urban governments can integrate environmental concerns into their development plans (including meeting global as well as local environmental responsibilities). But we have little evidence of national governments and international agencies changing their institutional structures and funding mechanisms to act on these precedents.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press.

2World Bank (2000) World Development Report 2000/2001; Attacking Poverty, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.

3Ward, Barbara and René Dubos (1972), Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, Andre Deutsch, London.

4Ward, Barbara (1976) The Home of Man, W.W. Norton, New York.

5I had begun work at IIED in 1974 as Barbara Ward's research assistant, for the preparation of the book The Home of Man. I remember well the letters and memos written to Barbara Ward by Jorge Hardoy. Also the fact that these were raising issues that other advisers were not. At the time, I had no inkling that I would come to work with Jorge Hardoy from 1978 until his death in 1993.

6 The findings from this work were summarized in: Hardoy, Jorge E and David Satterthwaite (1989) Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World, Earthscan, London. The book is still in print.

7Despite the logistical nightmare of getting specialists from all the world to meet in Moscow or Leningrad/St Petersburg and the need for WHO staff to import all equipment (including photocopiers since the Soviet hosts would not provide these), the meetings were remarkably productive. They also produced some strange events – I remember searching for somewhere to eat supper in St Petersburg with a Filipino water engineer and a Brazilian public works specialist and finding no café where they could understand us, until in one, there was an Ethiopian student who was washing up who helped us to order a meal.

8Although Tade Akin Aina is now with the Ford Foundation, he has remained on the journal's editorial board ever since.

9Hardoy, Jorge E, Sandy Cairncross and David Satterthwaite (eds) (1990), The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities, Earthscan Publications, London.

10Environment and Urbanization 8 (2), October 1996

11When Argentina returned to democratic rule, Jorge Hardoy accepted the inv.itation of the Argentine government to head its National Commission on Historical Monuments. Although he refused to accept a salary for this work, he built up a team at this Commission which rescued many of Argentina's most important historical buildings and locations; he also pioneered the integration of social concerns into this work.

12See Hardoy, Ana, Jorge E Hardoy and Ricardo Schusterman (1991) ‘Building community organization: the history of a squatter settlement and its own organizations in Buenos Aires’, Environment and Urbanization 3(2), October, pp104-120.

13The Earthscan books included: Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World (1989); The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities (1990); Environmental Problems in Third World Cities (1992); Funding Community Initiatives, (1994); The Environment for Children (1996); The Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Cities (1998); Cities for Children (1998); and Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World (2001).

14More than 20 books have been published in Spanish, most of them by Grupo Editor Latinoamericano (GEL) including: Feijoo, Maria del Carmen and Hilda Herzer (eds) (1991) Las Mujeres y la Vida de las Ciudades; Pírez, Pedro with Claudia Minoliti and Marcos Novaro (1991) Municipio, Necesidades Sociales y Política Local; Hardoy, Jorge E (1991) Cartografia Urbana Colonial de America Latina y el Caribe; Nora Clichevsky et al (1990) Construccion y Administracion de la Ciudad Latinoamericana; Hardoy, Jorge E and Richard Morse (eds) (1988) Repensando la Ciudad de America Latina; Hardoy, Jorge E and David Satterthwaite (1987) La Ciudad Legal y la Ciudad Ilegal; and Caputo, Maria Graciela, Jorge E Hardoy and Hilda M Herzer (eds) (1985) Desastres Naturales y Sociedad en America Latina.

15This included the drafting of the book Our Planet, Our Health working with the World Health Organization's International Commission on Environment and Health in 1992, preparing An Urbanizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements 1996 (Oxford University Press, 1996) for the UN Centre for Human Settlements and helping to prepare Shaping the Urban Environment in the 21st Century: From Understanding to Action for the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2000. During 2000-2001, programme staff also contributed to the US Academy of Science's report on urban demography in the Third World and to a CD-ROM on urban environmental issues prepared by the World Bank.

16Among the other agencies that subsequently helped to support the distribution of this journal and IIED's seminar and publication programme are the Dutch Ministry for Development Cooperation, the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development, the UK Government's Department for International Development and DANCED (Danish Cooperation for Environment and Development). The support of the latter two has allowed Environment and Urbanization to have its full text available on the Web and to have a widely circulated summary of each issue sent to staff from governments and international agencies.

17The findings were published in Arrossi, Silvina et al (1994) Funding Community Initiatives, Earthscan, London.

18Roger Hart was one of the co-authors of The Environment for Children which IIED prepared for UNICEF and which was jointly published by UNICEF and Earthscan in 1996.

19These are described and discussed in two new Earthscan books to which Programme staff contributed: Hardoy, JE, D Mitlin and D Satterthwaite (2001) Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World: Supporting Local Solutions to City Problems in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Earthscan, London; and McGranahan, G, P Jacobi, J Songsore, C Surjadi and M Kjellén (2001) The Citizens at Risk: From Urban Sanitation to Sustainable Cities, Earthscan, London.

20See the October 2001 issue of Environment and Urbanization (13(2)) for more details.